"Pauline Kael said it was 'meditative', but I fell asleep."

while most would pray sarris submitted his obituary of pauline before 9/11 (she died on september 3rd, the observer street date was the 17th), i kinda hope he was describing the bruises she inflicted on him that week.

without trying to fit everything into a /system/,

is what lets people who've in no way proven their intellectual superiority, talk about her like an idiot savant.

"what does she know, she only sees movies once" - as if watching a movie multiple times means you know anything more than what's on the screen.

In what other art form is okay to write about something after experiencing it only once?

James, seriouslY?

I don't think Hurry Sundown had a future with her nohow. I guess the kind of film I would have most liked to see her to back to were her oddball enthusiasms, something like Shoot the Moon. When she reviews Mississippi Burning a few years later, a brief mention of whether or not the film held up for her. She was so different than most critics there, I think that's of value.

"go back to"

Last post was xpost. So the argument is now: she really did rewatch stuff, she was just trying to tick Andy off and have the last laugh, and if she didn't it was okay because there was another raft of masterpieces waiting to be watched and time waits for no one?

Beyond the number of critics who do the same with books and music, you answered your own question: she saw and wrote so well about that so-called first viewing (which you can believe if you want) that it looks like a fourth.

Okay, I fell into your trap.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OPxxG31JOCg

with music i prefer critics who listen deeply because if a song is good i plan to hear it more than once, and want to know it holds up over many listens. most movies i'll only see once and therefore i'm cool with critics doing likewise, assuming they've got a good memory or fact-checker

yeah I get that. A song is three minutes, listened to wherever. You gotta make time for movies.

I'll betray my rock-critic heritage here, but investing deeper attention and more repeat visits to a three-minute song than a three-hour film doesn't quite compute for me (realizing that you will, as a practical matter, inevitably do the latter)...Anyway, going to watch The Candidate for the 29th time right now, so proceed apace.

2X speed on the PS3 for DVDs/Blu-Ray is a life-changing w/r/t slow cinema.

Search: George Washington
Destroy: In the Mood

Just remembered something of hers that I did really like: her piece on Satyajit Ray's Devi.

shit, she is still this interesting to you ppl, huh

You were the reviver!

well that was more for Mlle Duras' torture of clemenza

Couldn't you have found something to torture da croupier as well?

I don't see why you'd need to watch or even listen to a song more than once, even if you like the song. Its about getting the moments you need from the thing to make your argument?

I don't see why you'd need to read a Pauline Kael review more than once

But she writes with such language and passion!

Don't subsequent viewings of a great film deepen your engagement with it? I almost always notice new stuff the second, third, and forth time around--usually small stuff, but sometimes my whole perception of the film will shift. Admittedly, I take revisiting favorites to a ridiculous extreme, and obviously that's a separate issue if your job is to review new films as they come out.

Forth and long. Positively Forth Street.

Sure it does. I was mostly talking tackling the qn from the standpoint of giving a considered reaction, which you can do from one viewing.

I like watching films I've enjoyed a few years after my first viewing of them.

Let's see how meditative Norte, The End of History feels.

Not the word I'd use!

It's good tho imo. To pointlessly compare it with another long film from this year, the descent into abjection doesn't feel cheap, idiotic and insulting the way it does in nymphomaniac

The funny thing about this thread title (which I realize is just meant to make a point, and isn't based on a direct quote...I don't think) is that I wonder if Kael ever called a film meditative and intended that as praise. Or if it's a word she ever used at all.

yeah i've always hated this thread title, b/c pauline kael was just about the last critic to call something "meditative," let alone as a word of praise. in fact one thing that makes her writing so exasperating is how little patience she has for films that take their time.

I think we end up debating this point every bump.

I don't like the title because I open the thread each revive looking for a slow cinema s/d & four out of five times it's about this writer I haven't read (who already has 3 threads devoted to her)

Apologies if I've posted this link here before:

http://www.bfi.org.uk/news-opinion/news-bfi/lists/10-great-really-long-films

(xxpost) I didn't check earlier in the thread--I don't remember the subject coming up, but maybe it has.

A few random threads:
antonioni
michael snow
tarkovsky's stalker

thx! That listicle is kinda weird, are long films that rare that they have to include trilogies & tetralogies?

internet comes through - The Age of Movies, via google books - "What is distinctive in Ray's work (and it may be linked to Bengali traditions in the arts, and perhaps to Sanskrit), is that sense of imminence - the suspension of the images in a larger context. The rhythm of his films seems not slow but, rather, meditative, as if the viewer could see the present as part of the past and could already reflect on what is going on." (page number omitted)

Looking upthread I see this was also cleared up five years ago. It's groundhog day.

meditative thread. interesting use of repetition.

*insert static footage of water flowing over bent reeds and assorted small manmade objects here*

Except for a couple of middling passages when the camera dozes off as the prisoner's family struggles, Norte, the End of History was excellent. The ending moved me -- and this doesn't often happen.

SPRANG BREAAAAAAAAK

I've seen lots of people insult a film by saying they fell asleep to it, even quite a lot on this forum.
I've never fallen asleep because I was bored by a film, I only seem to fall asleep during films I want to see very badly but I'm just too tired to stay awake.

Is this something regular cinema-goers do? Is it like "this film sucks, I'm quite tired so I'll stay and sleep rather than walk out"?

No idea, but your initial statement is completely otm.

I've definitely drifted off during films that bored me, but--seeing as I regularly drift anyway--I'll agree with you, that it has less to do with the film than my own sleep deprivation.

there are any number of films i love that i find deeply soporific... it was kind of a running joke with my friends in high school that I couldn't make it through a full screening of sanjuro
i'm not sure i've seen the end of a weeraseethakul film but i love him as a director
i missed the middle of lang's Man Hunt last night because the pacing was so measured.
the only time it's a dud is when you're in the theater and someone starts snoring. that sucks.

yeah i fall asleep during films i love all the time, i'm just tired sometimes!

bela tarr - didn't see earlier mentions, this dude is one of the modern masters of the long cut. see 'Werckmeister Harmonies' for decent sampling in a film of reasonable length. watch realtime transit of a truck traveling at 2 mph across a scene. bonus points for giant taxidermied whale and for screenplay by laszlo krasznahorkai

tarr and krasznahorkai line up on a few other projects (at least a couple adaptations of LK's novels) including satantango which runs like 8 hrs.

I fall asleep during every Miyazaki movie and I love them! I look forward to falling asleep during them.

platform by jia zhangke. never again.

Pauline Kael on Marguerite Duras’s The Lorry

Contrasts

“Small and bundled up, her throat covered, her unlined moon face serene, half-smiling, Duras reads aloud the script of a film… Hers is the only performance, and there has never been anything like it: controlling the whole movie visibly, from her position on the screen as creator-star, she is so assured that there is no skittish need for makeup, no nerves, quick gestures, tics. The self-image she presents is that of a woman past deception; she has the grandly simple manner of a sage. Unhurriedly, with the trained patience of authority, she tells the story of her movie-to-be about the woman hitchhiker… [The Lorry] is spiritual autobiography, a life’s-journey, end-of-the-world road movie; it’s a summing up, an endgame. The hitchhiker travels in a winter desert; she’s from anywhere and going nowhere; in motion to stay alive. Reading the script, Duras speaks in the perfect conditional tense, beginning “It would have been a film—therefore, it is a film.” And this tense carries a note of regret: it suggests that the script is to be realized only by our listening and imagining…

…The stillness provides resonance for her lingering words—those drifting thoughts that sound elegant, fated—and for the music, and for her cinematographer Bruno Nuytten’s love-hate vistas of bareness and waste, like the New Jersey Turnpike in pastels. The foreboding melancholy soaks so deep into our consciousness that when the director yanks us back to the room, you may hear yourself gasp at the effrontery of this stoic, contained little woman with her mild, Chairman Mao deadpan…

…When [The Lorry] opens at the New York Film Festival this week, there’s likely to be a repetition of the scene in May at Cannes. After the showing, Marguerite Duras stood at the head of the stairs in the Palais des Festivals facing the crowd in evening clothes, which was yelling insults up at her. People who had walked out were milling around; they’d waited to bait her. It might have been a horrifying exhibition, except that the jeering was an inverted tribute—conceivably, a fulfillment. She was shaken: one could see it in the muscles of her face. But Robespierre himself couldn’t have looked them straighter in the eye. There can’t be much doubt that she enjoys antagonizing the audience, and there is a chicness in earning the public’s hatred. [The Lorry] is a class-act monkeyshine made with absolutely confident artistry. She knows how easy it would be to give people the simple pleasures that they want. Her pride in not making concessions is heroic; it shows in that gleam of placid perversity which makes her such a commanding camera presence.”

New Yorker, September 26 1977